One True Podcast

Join us for the second of three installments of One True Book Club ’26! In this series of episodes, we are reading the Hemingway-relevant selection, Under Fire by Henri Barbusse, the classic French WWI novel published in 1916. This episode covers chapters 10-19 of the novel. We discuss how Barbusse finds moments of unexpected humanity amidst the carnage of warfare and his subtle characterization o...

In this episode, we welcome Julia Cooke to discuss her new book, Starry and Restless: Three Women Who Changed Work, Writing, and the World , which profiles three pioneering women journalists: Rebecca West, Emily "Mickey" Hahn, and Martha Gellhorn.  Cooke explores these writers' shared temperament and celebrates their work as a forerunner to New Journalism. Throughout our interview,...

One True Podcast does its part to help your summer reading lists by covering a book that is not by Hemingway, but is Hemingway-relevant: Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire, the 1916 World War I novel that Frederic Henry and Count Greffi name-drop so provocatively in between sips of icy cold champagne and smoothly fluent billiards shots.  This episode covers the first nine chapters of Under Fire , where w...

Live from the University of Evansville campus and the Shanklin Theatre, where Rami Malek once trod the boards…  One True Podcast welcomes Alex Vernon for an interview recorded live in front of a captive audience of students, faculty, and community members in Evansville, Indiana, as he discusses his magnificent new biography of Tim O’Brien, Peace Is a Shy Thing: The Life and Art of Tim O’Brien . Ve...

In our fourth episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises , we examine the theme of religion and its role in the novel. From the title, the epigraphs, the pilgrims on the train, Jake’s self-conscious prayer, the festival of San Fermín, and the idea of fishing as a religious experience, Larry Grimes guides us through this vast topic and shows Hemingway’s religious design in The Sun Also...

Legendary scholar Jackson Bryer joins us once again, this time to discuss one controversial moment in Hemingway’s career, his vicious “poor Scott Fitzgerald” swipe in the original publication of “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.” We discuss the publication history of this graceless insult, what it says about Hemingway and what it says about Fitzgerald. We go on to discuss “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” as a...

In the midst of our centenary festivities around The Sun Also Rises , One True Podcast takes an opportunity to celebrate another Hemingway work published in 1926: The Torrents of Spring .  Elena Zolotariov, author of "'Black and Red Laughter': Subverting Whiteness in Hemingway’s The Torrents of Spring " (from the Fall 2023 issue of the  Hemingway Review ), joins us to offer an...

In our third episode celebrating the centenary of The Sun Also Rises , we examine the novel’s anti-Semitic streak and the central role of its Jewish character, Robert Cohn. We welcome the scholar Jeremy Kaye of Moorpark College for a discussion about this incendiary theme, the difference between Hemingway’s anti-Semitism and his characters, Cohn’s Jewish masculinity, his function as a scapegoat, t...

On the happy occasion of the publication of Francesca Wade’s magnificent Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife , we speak with the biographer about Stein’s life, work, and complicated relationships. Wade describes her access to new Stein archives that afforded her a fresh look on the enigmatic writer, the difference between Stein's legend and her life, the particular value of her various publications,...

In our second episode devoted to the centenary of  The Sun Also Rises , we turn our focus to the beloved Count Mippipopolous.  He’s an epicurean and an entrepreneur; he’s battle-tested, arrow-wounded, champagne-enjoying, no-dancing, business-tripping, generous-tipping... and he’s always in love. We discuss his role in the novel, his relationship with Brett and Jake, Hemingway’s original plan for h...

We are thrilled to welcome Susan Shillinglaw, the preeminent John Steinbeck scholar, to discuss one of Hemingway’s contemporaries and fellow Nobel laureates.  Although Hemingway and Steinbeck are not discussed comparatively as frequently as some of his other fellow literary titans, Prof. Shillinglaw talks about Steinbeck’s life, career, and temperament in ways that will inspire us to remap the ove...

Throughout the course of this year, we will celebrate the centenary of The Sun Also Rises by inviting guests on the show to talk about fascinating aspects of the book and its rich history.  In this episode, we explore how the book was actually written—from a sloppy first draft to a modernist masterpiece. What will tracing this composition history tells us about the evolution of The Sun Also Rises...

One True Podcast is back with a look at another Hemingway short story, an under-discussed gem from Winner Take Nothing. One of the weirdest works in his career, “Homage to Switzerland” is a Modernist experiment that tells a similar story three times, each one set in a different Swiss train station.  To walk us through this bizarre tale, we call on excellent Hemingway scholar and actual citizen of...

Happy New Year from One True Podcast! We look forward to a rich, exciting 2026 by looking back to 1926. In our first show of the year, we ask an esteemed guest to take us back exactly one hundred years to see what was happening in Hemingway’s life, work, and world. So, to guide us through Hemingway’s 1926 -- his travels, his relationships, his publishing, and his writing – we welcome the great Hem...

Thank you for making 2025 such a special year for One True Podcast! Together, we devoted shows to the centenary of In Our Time , to our One True Book Club discussion of W.H. Hudson’s The Purple Land , to the 100th anniversary of The Great Gatsby , and to so much more. We’re so grateful to all of our amazing guests for enriching and enlivening our program, and to all of our listeners for their loya...

One True Podcast would never let 2025 end without one more episode celebrating the centenary of In Our Time , so today we discuss a classic short story from that collection: “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife.” Scholar (and podcaster) Scott Yarbrough visits us from Charleston to lead us through the many elements of this great story: Dr. Adams’s quarrel with Dick Boulton, the doctor’s icy relationsh...

The prominent Faulkner scholar Ahmed Honeini first joined us in 2024 to discuss the rivalry and intertextuality between Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Clearly, in a topic so vast, devoted to the two leading titans of 20th-century American literature, one puny, inexhaustible episode was not enough. So, Ahmed Honeini agreed to come back onto One True Podcast to continue our pursuit of Heming...

The Great Gatsby celebrates its 100th birthday this year, and you knew that One True Podcast couldn’t let 2025 go by without joining the celebration. We mark the centenary of this great American novel by marking its importance in American literary history as well as the life and career of Ernest Hemingway. Fitzgerald scholar William Blazek visits us from his post at Liverpool Hope University to di...

Michael Deagler, the 2025 PEN/Hemingway winner for Early Sobrieties , shares his one true sentence from To Have and Have Not . Join us for our favorite Hemingway parlor game as this excellent novelist chooses his favorite sentence from everything Hemingway ever wrote. We discuss writing about addiction and recovery, Hemingway’s use of dialogue, the way The Sun Also Rises serves as a textbook guide...

One True Podcast looks ahead to the last volume of Hemingway’s letters!  Although Hemingway’s correspondence from 1957-1961 won’t be officially published for another couple of decades, the co-editors of the last volume of the Hemingway letters – J. Gerald Kennedy and Michael Von Cannon – along with their advisory editor, Valerie Hemingway, share insights about their work that covers Hemingway’s fi...

One True Podcast examines the most important male friendship of the last fifteen years of Hemingway’s life, his extraordinary relationship with Major General “Buck” Lanham, whom he met when he was an embedded journalist with the 22nd Infantry Regiment during World War II.  Greer Rising – Buck was his father’s godfather – and Eileen Martin join us to talk about Buck’s background, his military histo...

One True Podcast explores one of the most influential friends in Hemingway’s life: Eric “Chink” Dorman-Smith. Although Chink has been mentioned several times during past episodes, we finally devote an entire episode to this fascinating figure and his profound influence on Hemingway.  For this discussion, we welcome Lavinia Greacen, the author of Chink: A Biography and, most recently, Military Mave...

At One True Podcast we were sad to hear of the death of Patrick Hemingway, the middle son of Ernest, who died on September 2, 2025. Patrick Hemingway (1928-2025) lived a life that was truly Hemingwayesque: traveling like his father, living much of his life in Africa, hunting and fishing, and determined to maintain the legacy of his father’s literary work.  We invited Sandra Spanier, General Editor...

One True Podcast continues our celebration of the centenary of Hemingway’s In Our Time by examining a classic Nick Adams story: "The End of Something." We welcome Lisa Tyler to discuss the story, its setting, cast of characters, and curiously inexact title. We examine how the story serves as a prequel to "The Three-Day Blow," (while also pointing out many differences between th...

One True Podcast concludes its One True Book Club for the year with its third of three installments on W.H. Hudson’s 1885 novel, The Purple Land . This final episode covers chapter 21 to the end. We examine how Hudson resolves the domestic plot, the travel plot, and the confrontation with the diabolical Don Hilario. We debate whether The Purple Land ’s climax is or is not even climactic. Then, we...